Bill Nelson, a Capital Markets partner in Shearman's Austin office, spoke with Crunchbase about the impact of the SPAC boom on the private equity sector.
Despite all that capital and competition, Bill Nelson, a partner in the capital markets practice at Shearman & Sterling, said private equity often focuses their traditional buyouts in industries that are not currently being favored by the public markets, but still have strong fundamentals — looking to find a disparity between its valuation of a company and the public market valuation. SPACs also provide some new opportunities for many firms. Instead of taking up to a year to raise a new fund and waiting several more years to deploy the capital and even longer for liquidity, Nelson said private equity firms may see sponsorship of a SPAC as a quicker way to a liquidity event.
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